


Sit Upon the Ground

by Tarimanveri (Monksandbones)



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, Episode Tag, Episode: s07e17 Heroes (1), Episode: s07e18 Heroes (2), Gen, Grief/Mourning, Growing Up, House Cleaning, POV Female Character, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 16:29:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1354060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monksandbones/pseuds/Tarimanveri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cassandra Frasier and Sam Carter and what happens to our heroes as we grow up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sit Upon the Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the 2006 femgenfication at livejournal, prompt 191: "People do think that if they avoid the truth, it might change to something better before they have to hear it." - Marsha Norman
> 
> Original post [here](http://femgenficathon.livejournal.com/20313.html), reposted later at my (now abandoned) fic journal [here](http://tarimanveri-fic.livejournal.com/5089.html). Beta by amyheartssiroc. The bra remains a tribute to L, with whom I watched these episodes (still sorry, L, I'm horrible!).

Almost the first thing I did when I got back to Colorado Springs afterward was to clean the house. All those traces of Janet, right down to her dirty coffee mug from that last morning, were too much like my last few days on Hanka. I scrubbed down the kitchen and vacuumed the living room. I carried my rags and cleaning supplies into Janet’s bathroom. When I caught myself throwing her lipsticks into the wastebasket so hard I knocked it over, I slammed her bathroom door shut behind me and ran out of her bedroom and sat down at the top of the stairs and called Sam.

“We should have thought to clean it up for you,” said Sam, pulling me into a hug as soon as she arrived.

“I’m really sorry,” I whispered. “But it reminds me of before and how everyone was gone too fast to take care of anything.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to leave it now and come and stay with me for a few days after all?” she asked, hugging me closer.

“I think it’s too late,” I said, picturing Janet’s toothbrush still in its cup and her towels and her characteristically messy closet. “Will you help me with her room?”

“I’ll help you with whatever, kiddo,” she said, and ruffled my hair as I took a shaky breath in her arms. She hadn’t called me kiddo in a long time.

“Can we get it over with now, please?” I asked into her shoulder.

“Anything,” she said and ushered me into Janet’s bedroom with a hand at the small of my back. “Where do you want to start?”

“The bed,” I whispered. The sheets were thrown back and the pillows were mussed and Janet’s pyjamas were balled up at the foot. “Then the laundry.” The hamper was full too, so full that it was disgorging rumpled blue service shirts and a twisted bright-orange bra onto the floor next to it.

Sam took a breath and crossed the room. I followed. Sam seized a pillow and methodically stripped the case off it. I did the same.

“Grab a corner and we’ll get the duvet cover off,” Sam instructed. Together we stripped the bed as quickly as we could.

“Do you want to carry the sheets or can you handle the hamper?” Sam asked, throwing Janet’s towels onto the pile of her linens from the doorway to her bathroom.

I looked over at the hamper, wondered if Sam had meant “handle” to have the double meaning it did, and scooped up the heap of sheets and towels. Sam snatched the shirts off the floor, shoved them into the hamper, and clapped the lid onto it.

“Let’s get this all washed,” Sam said, picking up the hamper. I nodded. It was comforting to have someone else take charge. The two days since Sam’s phone call had been a blur of taking care of things myself – suffering through the sympathy of my roommate, booking the first flight I could get to Colorado Springs, meeting with my dean and my advisor, fighting back tears on the tarmac, and pulling myself together to meet Sam and Daniel at baggage claim. They’d explained that they had to be back at the SGC for briefing. “But don’t hesitate to call if you need… anything,” Sam had said. So I’d called.

“Where’s the detergent?” asked Sam, lifting the top of the washing machine. I dropped my armful of bedding onto the floor outside the door of the laundry room.

“In the cabinet under the washbasin,” I said. Sam started unloading the hamper into the machine. I stood by and watched, fighting to swallow the treacherous, aching lump that was suddenly rising in my throat, so caught up in not breaking down that it didn’t register at first how Sam was flinging Janet’s clothing all together, indiscriminately into the washer. Then she pulled out one of Janet’s lab coats, the ones Janet was always supposed to leave on base or at the Air Force hospital to have washed but sometimes forgot to take off before she left, and her flurry of movement stopped abruptly. She fumbled with it for a moment, came up with the care tag, and stared at it, too intently, for too long. Then she put it down on the rim of the washing machine and turned away from me and sank down to the floor.

I crept over to her, feeling stricken, and touched her gently on the shoulder. “Sam? Sam?”

She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. “Cassie. I’m so sorry. I…” she began.

I realized that from Sam’s perspective, I had just asked her to help me do what amounted to washing away some of the last physical traces of her best friend. I slid down the smooth front of the washing machine to sit next to her. “It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to be…”

You don’t have to be strong for me. I’ve survived worse. I can handle it, I meant to say, but Sam interrupted.

“I can’t help but think, what if I’d been less focused on Jack, you know?” she said with a sudden blaze of anger that caught me off guard. “What if I’d held my position? Maybe I’d have seen something. Maybe I’d have been able to do something.”

Her anger went through me like a knife. An answering flare of fury sprang up in me. I’d been told what had happened. How dare Sam act as though she thought she could save everyone? How dare she let the misplaced angst from some god-complex distract her from Janet’s death? How dare, a selfish, little-girl voice piped up, she let it distract her from me? I opened my mouth to say so, but then something else registered. My anger evaporated and I choked on my words. “Jack?” I asked instead, inanely.

“Oh God,” said Sam, burying her face in her hands.

I’d grown up a lot since I’d last tried to comfort Sam. Even after everything that had happened to me when I came to Earth, I’d still been so innocent back in the days of Jolinar – finger-painting rainbows, thinking there was no problem too great for the combined forces of SG-1 and Janet to solve. This time, I didn’t know whether I should try and hug her, or touch her, or just let her be. But the way she was still hiding her face and trying to muffle her sobs tore at me. She might have had a god-complex, but then, she was only human. I scooted closer to her. “Sam?” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

She peeked out at me with one wet eye, and then lifted her head and took a long, shuddering breath. She scrubbed at her face and leaned back against the washing machine.

“Sam?” I asked again, leaning my shoulder against hers, craning my neck to look into her tearstained face.

“Just… give me a minute, okay?” she said. She looked up at the ceiling, took another couple of breaths, and wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve.

“It’s complicated,” she said at length. She didn’t look at me. She looked down at her upturned hands lying limply between her knees. “You know I’m with Pete now, and that, it’s… it’s great, really great.”

She took another sighing breath. “It’s just… he’s – Jack’s – always been… and then when I saw him take the blast and just lying there…” She took a shuddering breath. “I just… it was like everything else disappeared and I… I would have laid down and died with him right there… and I just don’t know...”

I nodded, without finding anything to say.

“The thing is,” said Sam, and wiped her eyes again with her bunched-up sleeve, “I forgot about the mission. It was just… gone. I forgot about everyone else, and that was when it happened. I’m sure it was. I just… I just feel like I failed everyone,” she croaked. “Janet most of all.”

I sincerely doubted that Janet would have blamed Sam at all for losing her focus when she saw one of her team go down, but Sam cut me off again before I could say so.

“You know, the ironic thing is,” she said, “I told Janet once, remember when Jack was trapped on Edora after the meteor shower? She asked, and I told her that it – my feelings – wouldn’t be a problem.” She pulled Janet’s lab coat down from the top of the washer above her. She carefully smoothed out the name tape in the collar and gulped back another sob. “God, I wish I’d told her the truth.”

My stomach seemed to hit the floor as it dawned on me what Sam was confessing to. Sam… Jack… my head whirled a bit. There was something between Sam and Jack, and that was against regulations, and she hadn’t done anything about it, and… oh. She’d lapsed and her feelings had affected her judgment for a moment and now she was blaming herself for everything because she felt so guilty about it.

I felt like I’d just aged about ten years. I felt like I’d learned more about Sam in the last few minutes than I had in six years of playing biweekly chess with her and hearing about how she saved the world every time. My head whirled a bit more, with too many things I wanted to say but couldn’t. I’m honored that you’re telling me this. It’s okay that you’re only human. Your secret’s safe with me.

Sam, though, suddenly seemed to think better of what she was doing. “Oh, Cassie,” she said, straightening up, looking appalled. “I’m so sorry. The last thing you need is to listen to my problems right now. You’ve got enough to deal with as it is.”

That hurt a bit, because Sam had never talked to me about herself like she just had, like an equal, and I was, yes, proud to have her confidence. It was the kind of thing you’d tell a good friend when it was too much to keep to yourself. And… “Who else could you have told? My…” It didn’t come out quite like I intended. Sam winced. I felt my eyes fill with tears for about the millionth time in the last two days. “…Mother?” I finished, and this time the tears weren’t going away.

Sam gathered me up and hugged me to her shoulder, like she hadn’t done since she’d come back to me when she should have left me alone to die and bundled me up instead in a blanket and held tight to me. “I’m so sorry, Cassie,” she said over and over, rocking me there on the laundry room floor, with the cold damp from the concrete seeping into my pants. “I’m so sorry.” I thought she was crying again too.

Sam wiped her eyes on Janet’s lab coat, which was still in her lap and stood up when I finally pulled away from her and wiped away my own tears. She pulled the tangle of Janet’s clothes out of the washer, sorted them and put them back in, me watching all the while from the floor, still propped against the front of the machine. She measured out the soap and set the dials, and looked down at me.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, and shut the lid of the washer with a final clang. She reached a hand down to mine and pulled me up. “We’ll go get lunch or…” Her strained voice spoke volumes as to how much things still weren’t okay, and how long it would be until they were. “…Or something.”

As I scrambled to my feet, I met Sam’s red-rimmed blue eyes for a moment nearly on a level before she turned toward the bottom of the stairs. As I followed her away, it struck me suddenly that for all she was a soldier, she was a lot smaller than I thought of her as being, and that for all I would always love and admire her, I was almost as tall as she was.


End file.
